Healthy people given the serotonin-enhancing antidepressant citalopram were willing to pay almost twice as much to prevent harm to themselves or others than those given placebo drugs in a moral decision-making experiment ...

(HealthDay)—Not all placebos are equally effective for knee osteoarthritis and some can trigger clinically relevant responses, according to a review published online July 28 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

You don't think you're hungry, then a friend mentions how hungry he is or you smell some freshly baked pizza and whoaaa, you suddenly feel really hungry. Or, you've had surgery and need a bit of morphine for pain. As soon ...

Tamsulosin works no better than placebo on small kidney stones, but does improve passage of more large kidney stones than placebo does. The results of this large clinical trial evaluating tamsulosin versus placebo were published ...

Boosting levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine can lead to increased risk-taking, according to research published July 8 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dopamine is involved in reward learning, and previous research has ...

Among patients with a first episode of pulmonary embolism (the obstruction of the pulmonary artery or a branch of it leading to the lungs by a blood clot) who received 6 months of anticoagulant treatment, an additional 18 ...

Kessler Foundation researchers published results of their TBI-MEM trial, the first study to demonstrate significant changes in cerebral activation after memory retraining in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). ...

Jul 08, 2015

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Placebo

A placebo is a sham medical intervention. In one common placebo procedure, a patient is given an inert sugar pill, told that it may improve his/her condition, but not told that it is in fact inert. Such an intervention may cause the patient to believe the treatment will change his/her condition; and this belief does indeed sometimes have a therapeutic effect, causing the patient's condition to improve. This phenomenon is known as the placebo effect.

Placebos are widely used in medicine, and the placebo effect is a pervasive phenomenon; in fact, it is part of the response to any active medication. However, the deceptive nature of the placebo creates tension between the Hippocratic Oath and the honesty of the doctor-patient relationship. The placebo effect points to the importance of perception and the brain's role in physical health.

Since the publication of Henry K. Beecher's The Powerful Placebo in 1955 the phenomenon has been considered to have clinically important effects. This view was notably challenged when in 2001 a systematic review of clinical trials concluded that there was no evidence of clinically important effects, except perhaps in the treatment of pain and continuous subjective outcomes. The article received a flurry of criticism, but the authors later published a Cochrane review with similar conclusions. Most studies have attributed the difference from baseline till the end of the trial to a placebo effect, but the reviewers examined studies which had both placebo and untreated groups in order to distinguish the placebo effect from the natural progression of the disease.